Canterton had some of Darwin’s thoroughness and patience. He had spent hours watching centipedes or the spore changes of myxomycetes on a piece of dead fir bough. He experimented with various compounds for the extinction of slugs, and studied the ways of wood-lice and earth worms. All very ridiculous, no doubt, in a man whose income ran into thousands a year. Sometimes he had been able to watch a shrew at work, or perhaps a queer snuffling sound warned him of the nearness of a hedgehog. This was the utilitarian side of his vigils. He was greatly interested, æsthetically and scientifically, in the sleep of plants and flowers, and in the ways of those particular plants whose loves are consummated at night, shy white virgins with perfumed bodies who leave the day to their bolder and gaudier fellows. Some moth played Eros. He studied plants in their sleep, the change of posture some of them adopted, the drooping of the leaves, the closing of the petals. All sorts of things happened of which the ordinary gardener had not the slightest knowledge. There were atmospheric changes to be recorded, frosts, dew falls and the like. Very often Canterton would be up before sunrise, watching which birds were stirring first, and who was the first singer to send a twitter of song through the grey gate of the dawn. But as he walked through the fir woods towards Orchards Corner, his eyes were not upon the ground or turned to the things that were near him. Wisps of a red sunset still drifted about the west, and the trunks of the trees were barred in black against a yellow afterglow. Soon a full moon would be coming up. Heavy dew was distilling out of the quiet air and drawing moist perfumes out of the thirsty summer earth. Blue dusk covered the heathlands beyond Orchards Corner, and the little tree-smothered house was invisible. A light shone out from a window as Canterton walked up the lane. Something white was moving in the dusk, drifting to and fro across the garden like a moth from flower to flower. Canterton’s hand was on the gate. Never before had night fallen for him with such a hush of listening enchantment. The scents seemed more subtle, the freshness of the falling dew indescribably delicious. He passed an empty chair standing on the lawn, and found a white figure waiting. “I wondered whether you would come.” “I did not wonder. What a wash of dew, and what scents.” “And the stillness. I wanted to see the moon hanging in the fir woods.” “The rim will just be topping the horizon.” “You know the time by all the timepieces in Arcady.” “I suppose I was born to see and to remember.”